Chapter Seven
Felix
The thing about Shay's apartment was that it had no system.
This was not a criticism. It was an observation.
I had made it many times, in many configurations, across four years of being in this space with the frequency of someone who had, at some point, stopped noticing he was always here.
The couch faced the wrong direction for the television.
The kitchen had good knives , excellent knives, actually, which I had chosen not to examine too closely , and nothing else organized in any coherent way.
There were skates by the door that were not the current season's skates.
There was a throw blanket on the floor that had never, in my memory, been on the couch it presumably belonged to.
There was a mug on the windowsill containing, as far as I could tell, a dead plant that Shay was either deeply optimistic about or had stopped seeing entirely.
There was no system.
There was, currently, Shay O'Brien sprawled across sixty percent of his own couch, sock feet up on the armrest, scrolling through something on his phone with the post,practice looseness of a man whose body had been used correctly and was now completely, contentedly done.
He had showered at the rink. His hair was still slightly damp at the back.
He had changed into a t,shirt with a small tear near the collar that I had seen before.
I knew the tear. I had been in this apartment enough times that I knew the tear.
I was sitting on the remaining forty percent of the couch with my elbows on my knees and my water bottle on the table and I had been, for approximately eleven minutes, telling myself to say something logical.
I had several logical things to say. I had prepared them in the car. I was going to say them.
Shay looked up from his phone.
"You're thinking very loudly," he said.
"I'm not thinking anything."
He looked at me with the expression of a man in possession of four years of evidence. He didn't say anything. He put his phone down on his chest and looked at the ceiling.
The television was on at low volume , some game, not ours. The refrigerator hummed. Outside, a car passed and the light moved briefly across the wall and was gone.
"Rough practice," he said. Not a question.
"Transition coverage was sloppy."
"It was sloppy," he agreed. "Mivo's still,"
"Mivo will be fine. He's adjusting."
"I know." A pause. "You were sharp today."
I looked at the television. "I'm always sharp."
"You were a different kind of sharp." His voice was careful. Calibrated in the way Shay's voice only got when he was paying close attention. "The kind where you're working something out."
I did not answer.
Somewhere, the game on the television switched to commercial. A car advertisement. Someone driving through mountains at a speed that was not legal in any jurisdiction.
"Felix," Shay said.
"Don't."
"I wasn't going to,"
"Whatever you were going to say. Don't."
He was quiet for a moment. I could feel him looking at me in the way I could always feel him looking at me , the specific quality of Shay's attention, which was nothing like anyone else's, which had a weight and a warmth and a focus that I had spent two years categorically not thinking about.
"Okay," he said.
He picked his phone back up. Went back to scrolling.
I sat with that. With the refrigerator and the television and the torn collar of his t,shirt and the dead plant on the windowsill and the eleven minutes of logical things I had not said, and I thought: this is fine. I am in control of this. I am a man with a system and the system is,
He shifted on the couch. Resettled. His shoulder pressed against mine, briefly, the way it always did when the couch was too small and one of us moved, the automatic accommodation of two people who had been sharing spaces for years, thoughtless and familiar and,
I said his name.
"Yeah," he said. Not looking up from his phone. Just , yeah. Easy. Like he'd been waiting.
I had things to say. Logical things. Correctly structured sentences about line chemistry and professionalism and the situation we were already in, which had a specific and manageable shape, and the situation we could not allow it to become.
I said none of them.
It was slower this time.
That was the thing that I couldn't run a version on, afterward.
The first time had been the hotel room and the amber light and a loss and the specific pressure of a bad night and I had been able to identify the contributing variables, isolate them, construct a narrative in which it made sense.
An anomaly. A confluence. A set of circumstances that had produced an outcome.
This was a Tuesday.
This was his couch, with the television still on low in the other room and his hand at my jaw and both of us knowing exactly what we were doing. There was no hotel room. There was no loss. There was no mitigating factor at all.
He kissed me like he had time. Like he wasn't afraid I was going to change my mind.
Like it was a thing we'd been doing, a known quantity, a room he had a key to , and I kept waiting for my brain to engage its protocols and it didn't, it just , stopped.
The running stopped. The versions stopped.
There was his thumb at my jaw and his mouth and the tear near his collar under my hand and the specific, catastrophic absence of any wall between what I wanted and what I was allowing myself to have.
Sixty seconds. More. I stopped counting.
I was, I understood at some point in the still and quiet afterward, completely in trouble.
The ceiling of his apartment was not my ceiling.
My ceiling had the crack near the light fixture, the one that branched left like a river delta.
This ceiling was smooth except for a water stain near the corner that had been there since October at minimum and that I had, on two previous occasions, stopped myself from mentioning.
It was an irregular shape. It looked like nothing. It was, objectively, not interesting.
I was studying it with the focus of a man who needed something outside himself to look at.
Shay was beside me , not tangled, just close, on his back, staring at the same ceiling with the loose, easy weight of a man who had completely put down whatever he was carrying.
He did that. He had always done that , a quality that was either incredibly simple or incredibly disciplined and I had never been able to determine which.
I said: "This can't be a thing."
Shay was quiet for a moment. I heard him breathe.
"It's kind of already a thing, Felix."
"I know what it is." My voice came out even. Controlled. I was very proud of it. "I know what this is. I'm saying it can't," I stopped. Chose the words. "It can't become a bigger thing."
He turned his head to look at me.
I did not look back. I kept my eyes on the water stain. The irregular shape. The nothing it looked like.
"Okay," Shay said.
I waited for the rest of it. The argument. The but you just, or the you keep saying can't or any of the things Shay O'Brien was entirely capable of saying and had, on previous occasions, said with precision and without mercy.
Nothing.
Just: okay.
I turned my head. Looked at him.
He was looking at the ceiling now. His expression was , I didn't have a word for it.
Not the performance. Not the easy Shay face, the one for rooms full of people.
Not the quiet version he got at two AM over text when no one was watching.
This was something underneath both of those.
His jaw was slightly set. His eyes were steady.
He looked like a man who had made a calculation and arrived at a number he didn't like and decided to accept it anyway.
"Okay?" I said.
He looked at me. Directly. For a long moment.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay."
I looked back at the ceiling.
The water stain was still irregular. Still nothing.
The television murmured in the other room.
The refrigerator hummed. His shoulder was two inches from mine and I could feel the warmth of it in the way you feel a fire when you're standing close , not touching, just aware, just the heat of it against the side of you that was facing it.
I did not know if he meant I agree or I give up.
I could not ask. I understood, with a clarity that arrived quietly and without mercy, that I could not ask because either answer would destroy something and I was not equipped to know which one.
So I looked at the water stain.
He looked at the ceiling.
The refrigerator hummed.
I had said it can't become a bigger thing with the full conviction of a man who had a system, and he had said okay, and I lay in the quiet of his apartment with his shoulder two inches from mine and thought about the fact that I had been in this apartment so many times that I knew the dead plant on the windowsill, and the tear in his collar, and the skates by the door that were two seasons old, and the throw blanket that had never been on the couch.
I thought: I already know every room in this house.
I thought: I already know every room in this house and I have been standing in the hallway for two years telling myself I am not inside.
I did not say this.
"You should eat something," I said. "You had nothing after skate."
He made a sound. Not quite a laugh. Almost.
"There's leftover pasta," he said. "From yesterday. Possibly the day before."
"I'll check the date."
"Of course you will."
I got up. I went to the kitchen. The pasta was from two days ago and technically within acceptable range and I heated it without asking because I knew where the bowls were and I knew he took his with more pepper than any reasonable person should want and I stood at his stove in his kitchen with the dead plant in my peripheral vision and the throw blanket on his floor and the sound of him on the couch in the other room and I thought:
This is the bigger thing.
This is already the bigger thing.
I brought two bowls back. Set one on the table in front of him. Sat back down in my forty percent of the couch. He sat up, took the bowl, looked at the pepper.
"You remembered."
"I always remember."
He looked at me, briefly, with something I was not going to name. Then he picked up his fork.
On the television, the game resumed. We watched it. We did not talk about the ceiling, or the okay, or the two inches of air between us that was doing a very poor impression of distance.
We ate the pasta.
I stayed for another hour.
It was a Tuesday.